


Life in the Real World

by sobrecogimiento



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-24
Updated: 2011-04-24
Packaged: 2017-10-18 14:18:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/189756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sobrecogimiento/pseuds/sobrecogimiento
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The boys wake up a week after the fire kills Jess, in a world plus John and Mary and minus anything supernatural</p>
            </blockquote>





	Life in the Real World

  
1.

There’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

Dean backs away from it, because it’s bright, blindingly bright, and the last time he was close to something that potent Sam—the idiot—had just ganked Lilith and the Devil was busy clawing his way out of hell. He’s terrified, thinking, nononononononononono in a constant stream because he didn’t say yes, he’s sure he didn’t, but there’s a sudden, gnawing fear in the pit of his stomach because he can’t say the same for—

“Sam!” he gasps, panting for breath as he surfaces like coming up from underwater. 

“Calm down, son,” a voice is saying. “You’ll hurt yourself, and you already had a pretty bad spill.”

“What?” Dean mumbles. His head feels like six different sorts of stir-fried shit, and he blinks up at the light angrily, wishing it would stop, leave him alone. It’s not angelic, just fluorescent, and he groans, closing his eyes and moving to throw an arm over his face, and that’s when he realises he can’t move.

Taking several deep, calming breaths and using a counting technique John taught him ages ago, Dean opens his eyes and takes in his surroundings inch by painstaking inch as his eyes adjust to the light. He’s in a hospital room. He’s in a hospital room, flat on his back, and  _there are straps holding him to the bed._  

“So,” he says, trying to keep his voice normal, “am I a danger to society?”

“What—? No, oh no!” the doctor chuckles. “That was just so you didn’t hurt yourself when we resuscitated you. How do you feel?” he asks, unbuckling the restraints. 

“I’m fine,” Dean says immediately. His head’s still pounding and his entire abdomen feels bruised, but so long as he can still move all ten fingers and toes (which he can, checked already) and breathe without assistance, the rest of it doesn’t matter—he’ll live. “Where’s my brother?” he asks, the million-dollar question.

“Sam’s downstairs,” the doctor replies (and Dean could kill him, what does he think, using their real names?) “You saved his life, you know. And almost killed yourself in the process.” The man fixes him with a reprimanding glare, forehead wrinkling between his glasses and his bald spot. He obviously doesn’t know that flirting with death so Sam doesn’t have to is all in a day’s work, but why would he? “A beam fell and hit both of you, but it also knocked you down the stairs, which is the only reason you weren’t burned alive. Your brother is fine. We woke him up this morning. From what I hear, he’s not allowing anyone a moment’s peace until he sees you.”

Dean breathes a sigh of relief. “Well, thank God for that.”

The doctor hovers indecisively for a minute, as if there’s something else he’s on the verge of saying, but second-guesses himself before he actually does. “He’s waiting downstairs with your parents. If you’re feeling well enough, I can ring the nurse and have them brought up.”

 _Parents?_  Dean thinks. Bobby he could understand if whatever happened was bad enough, and it must be pretty bad because the last thing he remembers is sharing a bottle of Jim Bean with his brother and watching crappy TV in a motel room outside of Dallas. If Ellen were still around, that might explain it, but he’s drawing a blank on whoever Bobby got to play the female role. 

“Yeah, sure,” he says. If Sam’s there, whatever. He can deal with the rest. “You gonna knock me out again if I try to sit up?”

“Here,” the doctor says, and hands him a button in a box that looks like it’s for calling a nurse, but then instructs him by saying, push up for the top half of the bed to lift up, down for it to go back down. 

Dean nods and adjusts the bed, otherwise doesn’t try to move because he sort of feels concussed and he want s to be awake for this because he’s hoping Sam can fill him in on whatever the fuck happened, and he needs to be conscious enough to understand exactly what the fuck’s going on. He holds his breath as he watches the door, counting the seconds, and only lets it out again when he sees Sam come through it, bandage on his temple and arm in a sling.

“Sam—“ Dean begins, but gets no further because there’s a warning in his brother’s face that he catches not a second too soon, and then he’s open-mouthed, shocked, because the next two people who enter the room are ghosts.

2.

Sam tells Dean he got a concussion and they both had a few bruised ribs, been out for about a week. Sam tells Dean a lot of things, but he’s recording it for later, when he can think past the roaring in his ears. It’s his parents looking at him, Mom holding his hand and smiling this tight, worried smile, Dad clapping him repeatedly on the shoulder and telling him to cut it with the hero crap, we know you wanted to be a fireman when you were a kid, but this is taking it too fucking far, son. 

Eventually, Sam gets them out of the room (thank God for that), and looks at Dean narrowly. “Jessica didn’t make it,” Sam says. “That’s the first thing they told me when I woke up.”

“Jessica?” Dean echoes. “She’s been dead more than four years, Sam,” he says, realising too late that might have been a monumentally stupid thing to do.

“She’s been dead a week, Dean,” Sam tells him flatly. “And it was just an ordinary fire. She was asleep, broken wires or something.”

Dean’s speechless. He knows it before Sam tells him, that the first thing Sam did when he wasn’t allowed to see his brother yet was find an Internet connection, look all over the web for signs of crop failures, cattle deaths, electrical storms around San Francisco. He’d come up with nothing. 

“Ok,” Dean says. “I’m glad you find this weird. What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Jim Bean and crappy TV in a crappier motel, and us trying to ignore the apocalypse,” Sam responds with a humourless smirk tugging his lips upward. 

“And now?” Dean prompts. 

His brother sighs, drawn out and frustrated. “I haven’t had much time yet, Dean, but from what I’ve looked at it isn’t just that this didn’t happen to us. It’s like it never happened to  _anybody._  As in, ever.”

“What’re you,” Dean mumbles, and then a little louder, “What’re you trying to say?”

Sam looks at him, eyes suddenly wide and terrified, face an open book. Man’s greatest fear is the unknown. “There’s nothing supernatural, Dean. I googled as many of our old cases as I can remember, and it’s a blank slate. I mean, I’m. I’m gonna keep looking, but so far as I know, it’s all just gone.”

There have got to be glass shards punching their way past Dean’s skull and slamming into his brain, his head hurts that much. He fumbles for the button the doctor gave him and starts lowering the bed again, leaden and weighed down. “Sammy,” he says, “I’ve. I got a real bad fucking headache. And seeing’s so you remember and I remember, that got to be something, I mean, unless I’m just in your head or you’re just in mine. But I can’t fucking see straight right now, so can you just turn that fucking light out?”

“Yeah,” Sam says, moving towards the switch on the wall. “You want me to leave?” 

Something in Dean wrenches at that. “No,” he manages. “No, get a chair and sit with me. I think I’m gonna sleep again and I want you to be here when I wake up, ok?”

“Yeah, Dean,” Sam obliges. “Yeah, it’s ok.”

He says it a couple more times, pulling his chair close to Dean’s bed, even though it’s really fucking not.

3.

Sam goes to the funeral and, tight-lipped, leaves white roses on Jess’s grave, shrugs off his friends, and tells the law school he’s taking time off. Someone or other important reassures him that they will still be open to discuss his options as long as his LSAT scores last, but Dean’s not entirely sure he’ll go for it, and then they go back to Lawrence.

It surprises Dean and doesn’t surprise him that he’s still living here, some girl recently moved out of his apartment, one of her panties stuck under the foot of the bed like an echo, and maybe he’s a little curious, sometimes, when he gets bored enough, but he’s mostly relieved. He’s got plenty to deal with, adjusting to this new world, without adding her—whoever she was—into the equation.

Mom and Dad ask Sam to stay with them, but even around the kitchen table it’s painfully awkward; these aren’t the same boys they knew before the fire, even if they don’t know why. It’s evident, in the way they talk and move and act and gravitate towards each other. From hints and surprised looks Dean gets that they could hardly stand each other before, that he went out to California for some unknown and uncared-for reason. Along with Sam, he claims a small case of amnesia, can’t remember the fire at all, some of what happened before that’s pretty blurry. 

“It’s alright, boys,” Mary says, hugging both of them until they’re out of breath, as John claps them on the shoulder and tells them, “That’s a good thing, son. It’s for the best.”

When Dean somehow gets them back to his apartment without driving them off the road, he collapses onto the couch and pulls Sam down next to him and says, “I miss Dad.” It’s not the same man who raised them, and yeah, he’s happier and healthier and never had to suffer a tragedy that nearly killed him and drove him to become more of a hunter than a man, and certainly more of a marine than a father, but still, he’s not the same. 

This John never took them hiking through backwoods after some terrible monster, didn’t teach them how to shoot, how to fight, how to hunt. He never drank himself into a stupor after a hunt gone bad, never had a screaming match with Sam during the kid’s teenage years so loud it rattled the windows, was never guilty of credit card fraud. He has Mary, was able to see his kids grow up like a normal father, and Dean’s happy for him, he’s grateful, but talking to him is like talking to John’s twin, a double that lived a different life and merely shares his traits. 

“I miss—“ Dean begins as his shoulders start to shake. His hand curls around the back of Sam’s neck, under that ridiculous mop of hair. Sam is grounding, and Dean has always felt better with a hand on him, even when it was his brother he wanted to kill.

“Shhh,” Sam shushes him. “I know, I know.” And holds him as he sobs a river into Sam’s shirt, tears come three years too late. 

4.

Sam hangs around his apartment like a pale impression of himself, like a ghost, but Dean suspects that’s mostly because he doesn’t have a defined role here, and this, this is close to mourning for a death he’d moved past years ago as he can fake. Meanwhile, Dean’s got a job at this garage in town, and even if this world isn’t real he needs that because no one bothers him as he works, so he keeps at it, until he’s head-to-toe in motor oil, until his head aches and he can hardly see and his throat’s dry and cracked and his hands and back and legs feel bruised with lactic acid and exertion. 

So it takes him nearly a week to realise that Sam’s trying to do the job he’s already abandoned. Kid got a new laptop, huge and shiny thing that he won’t let Dean touch, and he’s been on it nonstop, which Dean figured meant he was looking for an escape, just not in this sense. It whammies him one night at the dinner table, after he’s showered and bone-tired and just wants to fall into bed and pretend he’s still comatose for the next eight hours and it hasn’t even registered to tease his brother for cooking because yes, he’s that far gone. He’s far gone enough to imagine pulling Sam into bed with him, even though he’s too tired to start anything, much less finish it, and way too fucking tired to try having that conversation. Dean just wants him there, and he’s trying not to think about it when Sam interrupts his thoughts.

“Dean, I’ve been researching,” he starts, and pauses while Dean doesn’t choke on his meatloaf, but it’s a near miss. “The thing is. Well. I’ve never seen anything like it. Everything’s missing. At first I was just looking up cases, ones I could remember from before I went to Stanford, and I thought someone else must have taken care of them, but it was too clean. There was nothing that would even strike a hunter as a red flag. And then, well, I started looking for cases—“

“You  _what?”_  

“No, let me finish,” Sam says hastily. “It not why you think. I started looking for jobs because I didn’t think I was gonna be able to find anything. And I was right. I can still find all the lore and myths, and horror classics and bad monster movies, but that’s all there is.”

Dean’s pulse is yelling at him, making his tired head pound. “What do you—are you saying—?”

“There’s nothing, Dean,” Sam confirms, and his jaw is set but his eyes are frightened. “And I mean nothing. There aren’t even ghost-hunter shows or phoney psychics. Nothing. I’ve been thinking that this might be a jinn thing again, or a repeat of what Zachariah did with that office life fiasco, but I can’t solve the problem of how we get out of here when I can’t find any conceivable way we could have gotten in.”

He gives a frustrated sigh and goes back to buttering his potato. “What do you think?” 

“What?” Dean asks, taken aback by the question. 

Sam gives him a straight look and he fills pinned. “What do you think we should do?”

“I don’t know, Sammy,” Dean says, running a hand over his face. He wishes the glass in front of him was full of beer, or something stronger, rather than water, and he is so very, very tired. “You can keep looking, I guess, but other than that, I just don’t know.”

“Damn it,” his brother curses softly and stands abruptly, snatching empty dishes off the table and stalking into the next room, where Dean can hear him dumping plates and glasses unceremoniously into the sink. 

After hovering for a moment, Dean grabs his own plate and glass and follows; he hates clearing the table because it makes him feel domesticated. Having dishware he isn’t gonna throw out soon as he’s done eating is part of a life that’s too stationary, isn’t safe, and as irrational as that may be he can’t shake it.

Sam’s loading the dishwasher, his back to Dean, shoulders tense. “Sam, hey,” Dean greets, and draws up short, feeling stupid, and puts his dishes on the counter. “The fuck’s eating you?”

But Sam just shakes his head roughly, continues rinsing off plates and filing them neatly on the bottom shelf, and Dean resigns himself to wait until he’s done. 

After what kind of feels like a few hours but the lying clock on the microwave tells him is only about three minutes, Sam starts the dishwasher and rests his hands on the sink, seeing nothing, so tense it looks like he’s gonna snap. He turns suddenly and grabs Dean’s shirtsleeve, hand still wet and leaving a water-stain, and for a second Dean’s exhaustion crosses the line into delirium and he’s sure the moisture will soak through, leave a branding mark in the shape of Sam’s hand to replace the one conspicuously missing on his shoulder, but the moment passes. 

“Dean,” Sam says, tightening his grip on Dean’s arm, and for a dizzying moment he can imagine Sam’s hands burning into his flesh, branding marks all over his body. “Dean, you do remember we still have an apocalypse to stop?”

Dean nods, but his head feels leaden, and he knows damn well it’s not believable.

Sam mutters something in Latin, and that’s a bad sign, a bad fucking sign, because he hasn’t been that pissed since he was a teenager. “Look, you. You’ve got to concentrate, ok? I need your help on this one. I’ve looked everywhere, Dean, and I can’t find anything, and sometimes I. I forget who I am and what I’m looking for and why, and you—You’re not even trying.”

Dean blinks at him, hot and cold all over and reeling from exhaustion, mind flashing back over all those blank hours at the garage, wanting to lose himself. Well, watch what you wish for.

“God damn it, Dean,” Sam curses, and when he moves forward Dean’s sure he’s gonna get some sense smacked into him, but instead his brother hugs him, and for the first time in a long time, Dean feels small. It almost jolts him back into reality, because he can count on one hand the number of times they’ve hugged in the past four and a half years, and it mostly has something to do with one of them dying. 

Maybe he is dying, Dean thinks. Maybe that’s what Sam’s been trying to tell him. 

Dean gives up and buries his face in Sam’s shoulder, thinking that he always smells good, even when he’s maybe not real.

5.

In the cold, Sam can almost forget that this world isn’t real; at five degrees Fahrenheit everything stands out in sharper detail. The leafless branches over his head look like black needles sharpened to a point and ready to punch holes in the gray sky. He closes his eyes for a minute, hears the wind, snow crunching beneath his boots, his father’s well-meaning but useless tirade behind him. He’s able to block it out, mostly, and ignores him in favour of scattering the bouquet of white roses across the Winchester plot. 

It’s the thirtieth anniversary of his grandfather’s death, or something like that, but Sam can’t bring himself to care. He’s known so many people who died, and even the Sam who belongs in this world never knew any of his grandparents. 

He turns his gaze across the river and if he concentrates he can almost see three miles past that, a white house with a huge tree in front of it that used to haunt his dreams, but that was in a different life. Inside that house Mary is having the same conversation with Dean that John is trying to have with him, something about Sam needing to get out more, Sam being too distant, Sam can’t keep holing up like this. Dean is shrinking, trying to fit into a mould that Mary expects, trying to fit into this false world even as Sam tries to pull him out of it. 

Demon blood, he thinks. Sam is the only supernatural thing in this entire hallucination, and then it clicks that it’s what’s keeping him sane. 

John is worried. He’s going on and on as Sam pretends to read the inscriptions on these inconsequential graves, and then says something about he’s happy his boys aren’t half a step short from killing each other, but he knows Dean is no replacement for Jess. For a second, Sam’s heart beats wildly, thinking that his father has seen this thing in him or in Dean that maybe they gave into, out in the real world, once or twice, when one of them was dying, but then realises this man does not understand. 

And the John that raised him, a defining characteristic of him was how well he understood, and Sam is chillingly depressed and absolutely furious like a pendulum, in fits and starts. He has one foot in each world and feels no connection with anything, except for his brother.

In the house across the river, Dean is reeling. If Sam concentrates, he can almost see Mary’s distraught face in the small kitchen, wooden table, decorative plates on the wall, radiating worry as Dean comforts her. 

Sam’s ok. Sam’s been working at the garage with me, started out part-time but now he’s doing like thirty hours a week. He’s not in the apartment all day.

Sam? Mary laughs. Sam can’t do an oil change, you know that.

Yeah, he can, Dean says. He took a couple auto mechanic courses at school. Needed electives or something. 

Sam crashes back into himself at the cemetery, where he’s been repeating these things to John, almost verbatim, and realises Dean almost believed that when he said it, almost forgot that year of teaching Sam to take care of the Impala himself so she didn’t fall apart after he died. 

It’s dangerous.

Home, Sam thinks. They need to go home, now.

He closes his eyes and the frigid, February air disappears. He opens them again to find himself in the apartment, standing in the living room and facing Dean, who mirrors his comically shocked expression. 

“How did you do that?” Dean asks, eyes immensely wide. 

But Sam knows it wasn’t just him; this is the first time he tried this trick and he’s about ninety-five percent sure he didn’t have the juice for both of them. 

So he returns the question, asks, “How did you?”

6.

From there, it becomes easy to manipulate their reality. Dean almost doesn’t realise he’s doing it, but it’s little things, the bedroom growing bigger until it can accommodate two beds and looks almost exactly like a motel room, the wallpaper in the rest of the apartment shifting to something cheaper and more generic, the pictures fading off the walls. He forgets to go to work for a week and no one calls him, and he can’t even remember what he was doing with his time.

Sam doesn’t go to work at all anymore, and Dean feels uncomfortably like he needs him whenever they’re separated, because Sam is grounding and he might lose himself, forget where he’s going on his way home and end up in another apartment with his signature written all over it, but absent of his brother. He thinks he almost does that ten times within the course of a month and it scares him.

For Valentine’s Day, Sam takes him to the cemetery, to appreciate the dead sleeping beneath the quiet earth, not one restless spirit in this fantasy. What they’ve been doing is something that escaped Dean, something he’s managed to ignore, until it starts snowing, but with a look Sam stops it a foot above their heads and causes it to snow upside-down. 

The hairs at the back of Dean’s neck stand on end with static electricity. “How did you do that?” 

“You know as well as I do,” Sam says, looking out across the river through the skeleton trees. “Anyway, it’s hard to keep the weather off, so let’s go home.”

Dean nods and they drive, not because it’s necessary, but because he’d miss the Impala too much if they didn’t.

That night Dean wakes up in a king-sized bed that had at some point replaced the two twins. He must have wished for it in his sleep, along with Sam, shifting towards him, draping his body over Dean’s chest, effectively pinning him, mouthing along his collarbone. 

“S-Sam,” Dean gasps. He’s not even  _awake,_  damn it. 

“Shut up,” Sam murmurs, and kisses him, only stops to drag Dean’s shirt, then his own, over their heads. 

“If this isn’t real,” Dean says, holding onto him desperately, “nothing matters, right? We can do anything, and none of it will matter.”

Sam grins against his neck, and Dean can imagine the wide, white flash of teeth. “Keep telling yourself that,” he says, tugging at the waistband of Dean’s boxers. “Keep telling yourself that.”

Dean nods frantically, and then kisses him until he forgets how to breathe.

7.

“Do you know why our parents haven’t invited us to Sunday dinner for the past six weeks?” Sam asks. He’s standing on a pile of ripped-up carpet, frowning at the designs chalked into the cement. 

Dean hadn’t even realised it, and paused for a beat too long before saying, “No,” so now it wasn’t a secret that he’d been ignorant. 

“Because we haven’t wanted them to,” Sam tells him, but most of his attention is on his work, so his brother feels safe enough ignoring that.

“Watcha doing?” he asked, and stepped gingerly over the arm of the couch, where he could curl up on the seat and watch Sam work without disturbing anything. 

“It took fucking forever and a day to find, but it should work,” Sam says, which doesn’t answer his question, but it was mostly to himself anyway. “If we can control this reality, it stands to reason that if we’re sleeping somewhere, we should be able to wake ourselves up. But we haven’t. So, I figured we need some outside help.” He squats, stretches out to thicken one line, draw another. 

“Sam,” Dean begins, even though he has a horrible, sneaking suspicion that he already knows, “what are you doing?”

“The closest thing we have to anything near supernatural is me,” Sam explains. “Three drops of demon blood apparently gives me a better grip on reality than you. So, I figure the quickest way to fuck up a world where nothing supernatural exists is to bring something supernatural into it.”

Dean feels himself go white. “Sam, are you summoning a demon?”

Sam wrinkles his forehead in a perfect don’t-be-stupid look. He drops the contents of a paper bag in the middle of the circle, and then a lit match. “I’m summoning Castiel, so help me out,” he says.

“What do you want me to do?” Dean asks, feeling kind of stupid and useless, but damn it, Sam could have told him about this beforehand. 

“Just. Will him to be here or something,” Sam guesses. “That’s how everything else works.”

Dean tries. He tries until his head aches from the effort and the only thing that keeps him from telling Sam to call it quits is the look of concentration and complete faith on his brother’s face. And then, after an eon, a silhouette rises from the circle

Castiel doesn’t look exactly human, a little too ethereal, something between the form that burns people’s eyes out and the meat-suit that let him in. 

“I shouldn’t be here,” he says quickly. “Your bodies are safe—I’ve hidden them—but I need to leave before they catch me.”

“Who, Cas?” Sam demands, “Where are we?”

“Heaven,” Castiel replies. “You’re in heaven.”

“We’re. What? How?” Dean asks. “How the fuck is this heaven?”

“You can change your reality,” Castiel says, very quickly. “You’ve begun to already. Zachariah found you using human informants and used a very old and obscure ritual to remove you from your bodies, which would get him cast out if it were ever discovered he was behind it. Empty bodies are available to whoever claims them.”

Horrified realisation begins to dawn on Sam’s face. “So Michael and Lucifer—” 

“Are not in your bodies,” Castiel interrupts him. “I managed to create a distraction and hide them somewhere safe.”

“How long have we been out?” Dean asks.

“A few days,” Castiel says. “I know it feels like longer in here.” His head snaps up, eyes turned to the ceiling as if he heard a sudden noise. “I really need to leave,” he insists, and begins to fade.

“Wait!” Sam yells. “How do we get out?”

“To get out of heaven,” the angel tells him, “you are either sent away, or you fall.”

Once he’s gone, Sam crosses three steps to the couch and collapses on it with a sigh, props his feet up in Dean’s lap. “So,” he says, “how do you feel about being a shooting star?”

8.

As it turns out, the world that they built for themselves doesn’t break as easily as it bends. Even isolating themselves in the apartment and willing the rest of it to fade away, it takes weeks to make a dent, white-gold and overpowering light leaking through cracks in the floor and walls and ceiling. 

They pull each other into bed between sessions, and Dean would like to think they’re still going by his philosophy, that nothing matters because it isn’t real, but he strongly suspects that he’s kidding himself. This will have repercussions in the real world, where Dean doesn’t know if he can trust Sam anymore and he’s sure the feeling’s getting to be mutual. This thing could make them or break them, and he pulls Sam closer to mask his fear, captures the image of him outlined in that blinding light and burns it into his memory for safekeeping. 

One morning he pads into the living room with bare feet and a bathrobe to find Sam hacking a hole in the floor with an axe he got from not-even-god-knows-where. Dean wants to say something, wants to encourage or stop him, but he’s frozen in fascination. His brother raises the axe a final time and hit something with a resounding clunk reminiscent of a knife hitting bone. 

The axe is sticking out of the floor, light rising from the blade and pooling around it. Sam, Dean realises, is naked, as Sam moves towards him, but then he’s removing Dean’s bathrobe and letting it fall to the floor. Souls, Dean thinks, are naked by default. 

“Hold on,” Sam tells him. “And you better hope this works, because if it doesn’t we’re both gonna die and then everyone’s fucked.”

But before Dean can ask what the fuck he’s talking about, Sam leans in and kisses him, kisses him as the floor gives out and they fall.

9.

“Dean,” Sam says, then more insistently, “Dean!” 

Dean blinks himself awake and frowns at the image of a huge, circular fan hidden behind metal grating that makes up the ceiling. 

He feels tired, emaciated and lacking substance, but is sure in a dull, throbbing way that if he goes back to sleep now it will be the last thing he ever does, so he gingerly sits up and blinks until Sam comes into focus.

“Sam,” Dean says, taking in the image of symbols carved into his brother’s chest and stomach. “Sammy, you’re bleeding.” 

Sam laughs, and Dean’s stuck there for a moment thinking that his brother is beautiful, just beautiful, and then he says, “You’re bleeding too, idiot,” and gestures to the similar marks decorating Dean’s torso.

“Huh,” Dean grunts. 

“Just stay there,” Sam says. “I’ll go tell Bobby we’re up, get some bandages and stuff to clean it with.”

“Bobby?” his brother repeats.

“Yeah, Dean,” Sam says, and stands there a moment with blood trickling and soaking into his jeans. “We’re in his house dude.”

“Oh,” Dean says, for the first time taking note of his surroundings. “Panic room.”

Sam nods, and remains visibly torn for a moment, between him and the door, then darts forward and kisses him, pulls away grinning wildly, which almost makes Dean’s heart stop. “Sit tight. I’ll bring some food down with me, ok?”

“Hotdogs,” Dean says. “I know Bobby always has hotdogs.”

“Yeah, ok,” Sam agrees, and kisses him again, more thoroughly. 

Dean grins like an idiot, can’t stop himself. This still doesn’t feel quite real.

10.

Heaven, in at least one way, is like hell, the slow passage of time that turns days into weeks or months. They’re probably more than a little similar in other ways, but Dean’s not gonna analyse it too closely. Between disappearing from the motel room outside Dallas and leaving Bobby’s after a few days to let Zachariah’s handiwork heal over, they’ve only lost two weeks, and it could have been so, so much worse. 

Sitting at Bobby’s kitchen table, Dean scratches his bandages absently while he waits for the chilli Sam’s making to be done, thinking about their next move until Bobby cuffs him on the back of the head and orders, “Stop scratchin’ it!”

Dean glowers at him with no real energy behind it and takes a swig of root beer. He had a moment of panic when Cas, of all fucking people, delivered his car, but he settled in ten minutes that there wasn’t anything wrong with her—except that she was a little cleaner than when he last saw her. Otherwise, it had been as close to relaxing as they could come with the apocalypse breathing down the back of their necks. 

Dean’s so happy to be back in the real world that it almost seems like a non-issue; he’s stuck in the adrenaline rush of winning, feels sky-high and invincible. There’s the nagging part at the back of his mind that says Sam hasn’t touched him since they woke up, but at least it’s not awkward like it was the first couple of times; this is more like nothing happened at all, back into the same old rhythms. But Dean’s not entirely sure that it’s a good thing, because if Sam’s not acting weird then there’s nothing to address. 

You’d think with the world ending they’d be able to get the fuck over themselves already. Dean sighs and kicks the table like a petulant twelve-year-old once he’s sure no one’s close enough to hear him. 

They leave after lunch, but not before Bobby’s hugged them so many times Dean’s ribs feel bruised and grated together, injuries smudged into something unrecognisable. 

He wants to ask, Dean thinks, and then realises that he doesn’t. He just wants some assurance that whatever fit between them in heaven can fit in the real world. He wants this as-is, package deal, and to somehow not fuck up things more than they already have. The next two hundred miles he spends in jittery silence, frayed nerve-ends warring each other on either side of his mind.

“Dean,” Sam says quietly, voice splintering the silence. “Stop it.”

“What?” Dean snaps before he can stop himself.

“You know,” his brother responds. “So stop it.” And Sam reaches over, places a hand on the back of his neck, swipe of his thumb behind Dean’s ear. 

Dean swallows and concentrates very determinedly on the road. Sam always throws him off-base, and he fluctuates between resenting it and being obscenely grateful. 

“Fuck it, I’m living through this,” Dean mutters, and Sam leans over, places an opened-mouth kiss on his neck, and laughs. 

~End


End file.
